Seeds

[Homily preparation two times a week has been where I try to be creative these days. Working on the Greek-Latin psalter on “friarzimm.com” is a non-creative job that is taking a lot of my time. The software, Wix, has not allowed me to move my Word files onto the site without a lot of manual reformatting. But here’s a recent homily, for Friday of the Sixteenth Week of the liturgical year, with the gospel parable about seeds falling in different places.]

 

Today’s gospel interprets the story of the seeds in a different way from the one I used last Wednesday. On Wednesday I said the parable is about how even a little effort on our part can result in a great harvest. Today’s gospel says the parable is about why sometimes the gospel does not take root when we try to share it.

I am going to do a statistical analysis of the parable. I want to estimate the percentage of people in the city of Quincy who fit each of the four categories in the parable. 

There are four categories: seed sown on the road, seed sown on rocky ground, seed sown among thorns, and seed sown on good ground. I will use the 40,000 people in the city of Quincy as an example of how we could think about the parable.

First of all, the parable assumes that the seed has been sown somewhere. How many of the people in Quincy have never heard the gospel? Of the 40,000, how many would you estimate have not even been exposed to the gospel in any formal way?

Most of us have heard snatches of the gospel just because references to scripture are so much a part of our cultural heritage. But some people have been influenced deeply by the gospel without being a church member.

An example: Abraham Lincoln. It seems that he almost never attended a church. But he makes reference to passages from scripture in a way that makes people think he must have had some kind of systematic exposure to it. For example, one of his most famous speeches uses the image a “house divided against itself,” which is an obvious reference to the gospel. How many people in Quincy would not even have that much acquaintance with scripture or the gospels?

My guess would be 40%, or 16,000. Much of our younger generation is growing up without religious instruction. (You can disagree with that number. I hope you do, because that means you are getting into what I am trying to do.)

So 60% of Quincyans, 24,000, would have the seed scattered among them. How many of them would be the road, where birds come and eat the seed up? My guess would be 50% of the people who have heard of the gospel. 50% of the 24,000 people who have heard of the gospel never get beyond just hearing of it. That’s 12,000 people, leaving another 12,000 for the other categories.

How many are planted on rocky ground? Let’s say 2,000. Another 2,000 would be among thorns. That leaves 8,000 people who are fertile soil where the seed can grow up to produce fruit.

I could go on and estimate how many of the 8,000 would produce 30-fold, how many 60-fold, and how many 100-fold, but I won’t do that, because that was not what Jesus intended when he spoke the parable.

Obviously Jesus didn’t care how many people were involved at any stage of the preaching of the gospel. His point was that there are conditions which make it impossible for the seed to sprout even when it has been sown, and that when it is sown on good ground, some of it produces enough that we can almost ignore the rest. Jesus didn’t care about anything more than that.

Which brings us back to the idea that his basic message was: God’s grace gets sown in all kinds of environments, and with various kinds of response, but in the end some of it produces far beyond what you would expect.

So, of the 40,000 people in Quincy, maybe 8,000 are hearing God’s word, and of those 8,000, some produce more fruit than others. But that is enough for marvelous things to happen.

And marvelous things have happened.

People bemoan how secular our society and culture have become. But our society and culture have been influenced by many of the things Jesus did.

Jesus’s public life was taken up with two things: healing and teaching. Look how much of the city of Quincy is involved in healing. The hospital and medical group are, I think, the largest employers in town. How many young people graduate from college with degrees designed to promote healing?

I am helping with the tenant workshops going on right now. One of the people attending the workshop  told the group that she was a recovering alcohol and drug addict, but her immediate goal was to take part in the St. Jude Hospital for Children run from Quincy to Peoria that took place last weekend.

Jesus taught. How much of our work force and our tax dollars are going to the public schools and John Wood Community College? How much are Catholics spending, in addition to their taxes, to support four elementary schools, one high school, and Quincy University? And more and more our schools, but public and private, are involved in healing, because so many of our young people need more healing than young people used to need.

Even in how we deal with crime, the goal of teaching lies behind our efforts. Our prisons are part of what is called the Department of Corrections, the DOC. Correction implies teaching. Rehabilitation has always been a goal of our correction systems, even when correction gets swallowed up by the politics of vengeance.

The seed has produced much fruit. But the seed needs to be sown over and over again in each generation. I think Jesus intended his parable not only to make us think about the power of God’s grace, but about the need for sowers. Jesus explicitly said that we should ask the master of the harvest to send workers into the harvest because the harvest is great but the laborers are few.

There are not many young men and women entering religious life and the priesthood. But the harvest is still great and the laborers are still few. We should pray that the master of the harvest will send workers into future harvests, maybe in ways that we do not now imagine. Nobody imagined that the harvest could be gathered the way St. Francis of Assisi gathered it until he came along and demonstrated a new way to do it. Since the time of Francis there have been men and women who gathered the harvest in all kinds of new ways. I am sure that history will not stop with those movements. God’s grace has a way of sprouting in unexpected places, the way weeds sprout in sidewalks.

 

Hitch-hiking--sort of

A while back I joined a small group of Quincy University friends that call themselves “the writers’ circle.” They write poetry.  

 

Poetry is not my favorite way of expressing myself, but I try.

 

I’ve been occupied for the past few weeks trying to get a version of the Catholic “Liturgy of the Hours” up and running on a separate website (friarzimm.com). So, just to keep this site moving, I am sharing a poem I wrote for the writers’ circle a couple of years ago.

 

 

Hitch-hiking—sort of

 

Ancient phrase: hitch a ride.

 

Never did it in my life. Yet . . .

          hang on,

          get pulled along,

          piggy-back,

          how I pray.

 

What is God? Where is God? Who is God?

          All question marks.

What to do?

I hitch rides.

 

Words in the driver’s seat.

Words of psalms,

          words more than 2000 years old.

 

Once, 1958, old retreat-master:

          “Love the psalms.”

          Words stuck.

 

Grad school, 1968. Didn’t know if there is a God.

          In case of emergency . . . use psalms,

                   say the words,

                   read the words,

          maybe there’s a God somewhere listening.

 

Today, 2022. Same problem.

          Same solution.

          Use the words.

 

Tradition packages the psalms;

          people read, say, sing

                   same words

                   at same time

                   on same weekday.

 

Time zones? Trust that the Lord adjusts.

          How many men,

          how many women

                   are singing, saying, reading, these words

                             right now

                             along with me?

 

I am not alone.

 

Latin.

          Latin joins me to multitudes across time,

                   beyond space.

          How many people prayed in Latin

                   across centuries?

                             Augustine, Gregory, Francis,

                             Clare (did she know Latin?)

                             Decatur hospital sisters, 6:00 am.

                                      Were they chanting Latin?

                             Then me.

 

Greek.

          Same words, different sounds.

                   70 men in Alexandria,

                   Luke, Basil, Chrysostom,

                   the Orthodox world,

                   Today, me.

 

I am not alone.

 

I hitch rides,

          get carried along.

          Best I can do.

 

Keeps the heart warm.

 

 

 

 

That remarkable amendment

 

[published in Muddy River News, May 13, 2024]

    Here is how part of the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution reads: “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion or prohibiting the free exercise thereof.”

    Protestant friends once told me that their minister told them that Catholic priests were so close to the devil that they had tails. Fortunately, by the time they told me that, they were no longer checking me out for a tail, if they ever were tempted to do that.

    But people did believe things like that. Years ago they might have been tempted to do something about it. They would have acted on their belief that evil should not be allowed to exist.

    Here is a translation of the First Amendment: Even though you think your neighbor is seriously wrong, keep your beliefs to yourself and behave with courtesy.

    Our country seems to be in danger of too many people forgetting the lesson that prompted the First Amendment: religious wars that went on for decades and centuries.  We are divided over two issues: is abortion an evil that our government should prevent? Did Donald Trump win the 2020 election?

    These beliefs are held so strongly that we could call them religious beliefs. But our country has a tradition of dealing with conflicting religious beliefs without violence.

    Violence is a tool of control. We are not called to control people who have religious ideas different from ours. We are called to treat them with respect. Maybe, like with the people who believed priests had tails, things will calm down enough that we can lock up the guns for good. We have learned that such an outcome is possible, and has happened many, many times in our history. Let us hope that it happens again in our time.

 Brother Joe Zimmerman

What about truth?

I have grown up with the firm belief that there are truths that God has revealed and that anyone who denies those truths is on the road to damnation.

Of course there are scriptural passages that support such a belief.  “If you remain in my word, . . . you will know the truth, and the truth will set you free.” (John 8:31-32).

But there is this philosophical movement labeled “postmodernism”  that is influencing the way a lot of people think, and, following our Franciscan tradition of facing challenging ideas head on, for example, the way William of Ockham did, not to mention Thomas Aquinas using Aristotle, I have struggled to appreciate what writers like Michel Foucault and Jacques Derrida are saying to us.

Definitions are important, both in philosophy and in my field, sociology. We cannot measure something until we define what we are measuring, and we cannot talk about something until we have some common understanding of what we are talking about. So I have developed two definitions:

Truth: Truth is the story that God would tell.

Postmodernism: “Any time someone claims to be speaking the truth, look out, because that person is angling to get power over someone else.”

The postmodern definition certainly fits the history of the Catholic Church. It also fits the recent history of truth in the Trump vs. anti-Trump struggles.

So I ask: isn’t it presumptuous to claim to know what only God knows?

No one can definitively tell the story of anything except God. All stories are fictions created by human beings.

We try to determine the truth in two important ways: courts and science.

In the courtroom, competing stories about what happened are compared. A judge or a jury makes a decision about which story is closer to the truth. No one can say definitively that either story is true, because judges and juries can be manipulated. We accept a decision by a judge or jury so that we can get on with life without resorting to armed struggle.

In science, we use observation as a tool in developing theory. Theory is fiction, narrative, a story. Observation without theory is meaningless—in fact, meaning in general is simply applying a story to something.

Because scientific theories are fictions, we use peer review as a way to determine whether a story is close to the story that God would tell. We know that peer review is imperfect. Peer review is assembling reports of observations that confirm a particular story. People are imperfect in describing their observations, and reviewers are imperfect observers of other people’s work.

We live in an age where scientific observations have upended many religious beliefs. “Evolution” is an older example. Today we are struggling for a story to describe the experiences that transgender people report. It is dangerous to turn too quickly to scripture, whether Jewish, Christian, or Muslim.

Religious organizations are in trouble today because people are wary of religious leaders who want to share the truth with others, especially when the leaders’ version of the truth has political or other implications. So people are staying away from churches. They may still be seeking the truth. It is just that religion has lost credibility in the search because religion has been too confident about its knowledge of what God would say.

No one really knows God, and certainly no one controls God, or what God wants people to do. We are all seekers.

Here is how I approach the issue. I do not know God very well. The stories of Jesus Christ are my most important source for knowing what God is like, but when it comes to my own personal knowing God, I am speechless. Every day I spend about an hour carefully repeating words of the Old Testament psalms, in the hope that somewhere, somehow along the line, God will speak to me. I think that has happened, but God’s speech is always very very quiet and unclear. So I return to the psalms. Then I look for God among the people I encounter from morning till night, and in the times when I join others for worship.

And in the meantime, I am not disturbed if churches are losing membership and attendees. God is still active in the world. I have to go around looking for where God might be speaking to me, looking for people who want to know God without telling me how I should live my life. And trying to be open to occasions when I can share with and learn from other people’s visions of the truth, even when those people seem as committed to their visions of the truth as much as I am to mine.

 

 

Lattices

 

        A lattice is a structure around which climbing plants can grow. The image suggests an inanimate thing, the lattice, providing a means for a living thing, a plant, to flourish.

        Churches are lattices.

        A church provides a structure within which people can experience God. The life is in the people and their experience, not in the structure.

        Take the Catholic Church. It provides places where people can gather, and gathering is essential for experiencing God. It provides scripts for behavior when the people gather. It provides resources like books and music that enrich the experience. It uses life events like marriage and death as hooks on the lattice to catch passersby. It creates a lattice of time (celebrating the story of Jesus in the liturgical year) that keeps reminding people of where their lives can go.

        Within the lattice, all kinds of different experiences occur. Some people experience God through mysticism, some through acts of service to others, some through a disciplined routine of prayer with others. Many withdraw from the lattice but continue to find God through memories of their experiences in the lattice.

        People who have never had contact with the lattice never benefit from what the lattice can provide. They are like athletes who grow up without coaching, and whose abilities may not ever fully develop, or like musicians who have not had people around them to nurture their musical gifts. Some people will overcome such disabilities and develop a relationship with God in their own way. Many will not.

        That is the cause for regret on the part of us religious people. We are like people who love music and regret that some people never get to experience the wonders of musical performance.

        That regret is the motive for what we call evangelization. We do not evangelize for the sake of numbers—statistics about church membership and ritual attendance miss the point. We who manage the lattice are managing wood and nails, not living things. God is moving in our structures, we hope, and sharing abundant life. Our role is to let mushrooms and plants grow.

        We of the structure are human beings, which means that we are sinful. We develop pathologies of structuring. We fall in love with controlling other people, or with pride in creating beautiful buildings and objects. We love creating rules, because rules let us gain power over other people. We get into fights with other religious people. This is especially true when we merge our lattices with political structures. Church and state merge, and smother life instead of nurturing it.

        For some reason we church people got the idea that we have to control the world in order for people to come to God. No. We just have to provide the lattice and get out of the way.

 

A poem

 Weeds

 have sympathy for weeds

            flowers out of place

true, not so pretty

            don’t look like flowers

            have to look close

but persistent

            even in sidewalks

 

God works that way

            life out of place

often not pretty

            have to look close

churches are sidewalks

            weeds are life

Jesus talks with a capitalist

Jesus:

Blessed are the poor, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.

Capitalist:

I'm sorry, but I have to take exception to that. In a capitalist society, if you are a loser, that means you or your family haven't tried hard enough to play the game. The game has rules. You have to play by the rules or socialism will happen, and we know that socialism is the work of the devil.

Jesus:

But that doesn't fit with the way I treated people who were poor, right?

Capitalist:

That may have been true in your time, but that was before the United States and other industrialized countries discovered the marvelous power of capitalism to make lives better for the poor. You just don't understand today's world. We have come a long way since the first century. Adam Smith and Ayn Rand, you know.

Jesus:

I think it is you who doesn't understand the world. The way you see the world is not so different from the world governed by the Roman Empire. And I know that world, first hand.

Let me explain it this way. Your capitalism is founded on a fine insight: that people do better when they can compete in a fair game. People don't want to be spoon-fed. They want to compete. But the game has to be fair. When the game isn't fair, the players get discouraged and walk away from the game. Your capitalism makes people compete with one hand tied behind their back. Then you blame them for being poor losers.

Capitalist:

But look at all the good capitalism has done for the world! Billions of people lifted out of poverty, billions living healthier and longer lives.

Jesus:

True, but look at the billions who are living on the edge of deprivation. Look at the people who have to leave their homes because it never rains any more and their crops and animals can't survive. Do you think those people don't want to play in the game?

Capitalist:

If they are losers, they must not want to play in the game.

Jesus:

I would say that you need to change the rules of the game. You have to make the game fair for all the players, not just for the ones who got there first.

Capitalist:

I hate to say it, Jesus, but you sound like a socialist.

Jesus:

They have called me worse.

Look. How will you lose if you change the rules so more people can compete on a fair playing field? The way I see it, God creates every human being to live life with abundance. When more people can do that, you should be happier.

Capitalist:

I wish I could, but the world just doesn't work that way. You are too soft-hearted. Life is hard. I said it before and I'll say it again, people just have to play by the rules.

Jesus:

You sound like some Pharisees I know. They get carried away multiplying the rules so people can't get in the game. I tell them that it is not God's will that one person gets lost. Translated: not one of them gets kicked out of the game.

Here's the problem. The system you call capitalism has a fine insight into how people live. But a disease has infected the insight--call it a demon--that inspires people to take as much as they can get even when they ruin the game for others. I'd like to do something about that demon--I have some experience with such things. But these days I have to depend on human beings to drive out such demons. I suggest you pay attention to people who talk like I do. You can learn, you know. You can change your mind. We call that repentance. It can lead you to a more abundant life yourself.

Capitalist:

I'll think about it.

Jesus:

One more thing. This fine way you play the capitalist game, it is heading for disaster because it is making the world unlivable. It is chewing up resources and pouring things into the air that are making the whole world hotter. You say that capitalism has done more for more people than anything before it. But it is on the brink of doing more harm to more people than anything before it. That is the way things go when they are infected by a demon. You should think about that too.

Capitalist:

You are messing with my head. You would mess up the whole capitalist world.

Jesus:

That's the idea. I appreciate your honesty. Do think about it.

 

The great commandment

A recent homily in the Quincy University Chapel 

“You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and all your soul and all your mind and all your strength.”

There is an apparent contradiction in the way this commandment is stated. How can you command someone to love? Love is supposed to be given freely, as a gift to the other person.

Here is a restatement of that first great commandment that suddenly popped into my head. It contains language that may sound vulgar, language that preachers should not use in a homily, but I think it expresses something that is important. It is important enough to break the rule about vulgar language.

Here it is, the way I would re-phrase the first great commandment.

“Love me, dammit.”

Literally, that statement expresses a truth: if you don’t love the Lord, you are damned. But the spirit of the statement is the spirit of someone pleading to be loved. The Lord is showing vulnerability and frustration in the statement. The statement is saying that the Lord wants and needs us to love him.

When you look at it that way, the word “commandment” does not quite express what is going on. It is a commandment in the sense that the Lord needs compliance from us more than that the Lord is demanding something from us.

Vulnerability is part of love. Our God is pleading for our love. Our God needs our love. That’s the way our God has made us.

Love is a two-way street. When God commands us to love, God is telling us that our response is just as important as what God just said. We are to approach God the way a child approaches a parent. There is the child’s dependence in the relationship, but there is also vulnerability on the part of the parent. The parent needs the child’s love. The child knows this, and it is a source of the child’s dignity.

The reason that every child’s life is precious is that every child has the dignity of being able to love God and that God needs that response from the child. Don’t mess with the child, because the child is talking with God, and God is listening.

We all have that dignity, even when we are a long way from childhood, and even when we may have done things that can destroy a relationship. God is just as vulnerable to us when we have sinned as when we are children who haven’t sinned yet. Jesus’s favorite statement was “God forgives you.”

So the next time we think about the great commandment, to love God with our whole heart and soul and mind and strength, we might re-phrase it: God is saying to us: “Love me, dammit.”